Your guest judge is Debbie Allen, and one can’t really have a truly negative opinion about Debbie Allen, so that’s good. Also, commercials for SYTYCD Canada! August 11, babeeee.

Top five girls: Bollywood. The judges worshipped this, but honestly it wasn’t that great. Randi was obviously sloppy. Melissa was frequently off the beat and also sloppy. Jeanine, Jeanette and Kayla were various degrees of solid; Jeanette was a little out of time but had the best vitality in her dance, while Jeanine and Kayla hit the moves dead-perfect (but weren’t as upbeat and “Bollywoodish” as Jeanette). Group routines tend to be more forgiving, though, so I don’t think it’ll hurt anybody.

Kayla and Short Evan Who Is Short: Viennese waltz. You know, I don’t think there’s a style that the judges are more forgiving on than Viennese waltz. It’s simply not a very difficult form of dance: it requires knowledge of the basic step pattern, the ability to rise and fall, and a little character. The hard parts are the lifts and free dance portions, and this is what inevitably happens on this show: those are the parts the untrained-in-ballroom dancers nail, and then they fuck up what’s actually the easy part. This was a case in point, because both Evan and Kayla had mediocre form (and Evan was stiff to boot) but their lifts were lovely. Given that this is Kayla’s second waltz I’m less inclined to be generous towards her mediocre performance in the basic portions of the dance. Evan’s limitations are showing up fast and furious now.

Kayla’s solo: Technically flawless but not very interesting: your standard Contemporary Assortment of Tricks, performed very competently. (What do you expect? She’s nineteen for crissake.)

Evan’s solo: Charming, clever, and well executed; he used his time very well and created not only a story but an appealing persona to win votes.

Jeanette and Ade: hip-hop. Jeanette was very definitely ahead of the beat on this dance, and it really showed towards the end when it looked like she was hitting some unison moves maybe a full quarter-second ahead of Ade. She also didn’t grind into the floor enough to really give it a proper hip-hop feel; it looked and felt cheerleader-ish to me. Ade was good, but not as good as I was expecting. I’m not sure whether that’s on him or on the Napoleon/Tabitha choreo, which I thought was average at best. Still, in a season of terrible hip-hop, this was much better than average.

Jeanette’s solo: At some point the producers will give up on this frankly stupid notion that ballroom dancers should do solos and let them do their “solos” with a partner; make the partner wear all black and a mask or something and the contestant wear sparkly clothes, hell, I don’t know. The point is that there’s really very little ballroomers can do in a one-person solo. Jeanette did about all of it, so what happens next time?

Ade’s solo: Rock solid.

Jeanine and Jason: contemporary. Well, everybody who was wondering if Caitlin was making Jason worse now has confirmation, because this routine was HOLY SHIT levels of amazing. (I am honestly amazed they haven’t let Travis choreograph until now; Benji was choreographing as early as season three.) A brilliant piece of choreo, danced near-perfectly by Jeanine and Jason. Simply a highlight of the season, pure and simple.

Jeanine’s solo: As excellent as always: what sets Jeanine apart from the other girl dancers is that her solos always have a point; they’re not just a series of contempo-tricks, but intended to establish a mood or tone.

Jason’s solo: Really good, abandoning the usual “I am desperate and here are tricks” solo we’ve come to expect from him for, again, a story within the solo.

Randi and Kupono: paso doble. See, one of the things that irked me about Kupono surviving and Philipchbeeb going is that Kupono is arguably more limited than the Chbeeb. He can do one thing well: contemporary where he is a quirky/weird character. If he’s asked to do anything else, Kupono just flops. For someone who’s supposed to be such a great ack-toah, paso should have been right in Kupono’s wheelhouse, but this was one of the great disasters in the show’s history: completely and utterly terrible with no redeeming factors. Oh, yes, Randi was terrible too. Paso should have fire and swagger and drama: this was limp and weak and slooooow and boring. How bad was it? When the judges said it was bad, nobody booed them. That’s how bad it was.

Randi’s solo: Sloppy and bad.

Kupono’s solo: Arguably the only contemporary dancer in the show who, when he gets desperate, does not do tricks, but instead does less.

Melissa and Brandon: Broadway. Tasty Oreo is BACK. This time he is ripping offblatantly imitating inspired by Twyla Tharp. This was merely okay, which given Melissa and Brandon’s various successes so far is kind of a letdown; I want to see more A+ material, not B-grade stuff like this. Melissa really needs to dance something totally unrelated to her training already.

Melissa’s solo: Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Brandon’s solo: A whole lot of tricks, but Brandon’s really good at progressing his tricks to at least build momentum, which a lot of dancers don’t do.

Top five guys: African. Again, the “it’s hard for judges to critique a five-man dance well unless everybody really fucks up” rule comes into play as a lot of undeserved compliments were thrown at the guys. For me, there were two clear tiers of performance here. The first tier (Brandon, Jason and Ade) danced very competently but didn’t quite capture the fire and spirit I wanted to see in the genre. The second tier (Evan and Kupono) similarly lacked in fire and spirit but also danced poorly.

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I’m relieved that Jason is getting the ‘mediocre to inspiring’ arc here, because he also has the ‘more strikingly beautiful with each passing week’ arc, and if he gets all the way to the final I expect him to turn into a being of pure white light and ascend into the heavens.

Great recap as always, so many great observations about the dancing!
I thought the men’s group dance highlighted the need for them to work on contraction, but their energy was good. Im annoyed with Tony and Melanie for not clarifying to Evan and Kayla that there is no rise and fall in Viennese Waltz because it confused the judges. As for their double heinous music choice for the paso? It makes me forgive the dancers a ittle because frankly, the choreography did not match the music at all. Same thing Jean Marc did with his paso. PLEASE, ballroom people, ditch the stupid movie soundtrack style music for paso on TV! Thank you.
Jason’s choice of Muddy Waters music redeemed him for his last solo. I love Evan, will someone please tell him never to dance in a jacket with shoulder pads again? We can’t see him dance! I like it on planet Kupono, but he’s not bringing the public with him on his journey, sorry to say.
I really enjoyed this show, despite my gripes, because even with the judges’ silly blathering, I felt their joy and pride in Travis and the dancers, and it made it all worthwhile.

Well, you know how much I was rooting for Caitlyn to get the fuck home, and Jason really shined tonight!!!

What the hell was that Paso? How did you not remark on Randi’s dollar-store tranny wig?

I’m totally with you on the B-grade choreography. Tasty Oreo’s routines are derivative and super stale, yet he just keeps coming back. Then they bring someone in like Travis, and the dude pulls out genius like that Jeanine and Jason number! If Tasty is out of juice, cut him loose!

Juice. Just like the juice in an orange. An orange you have to press against one of those juicer things and twist so you get all the juice out. Like that.

Do y’all canadians get the commercials for “More to Love” every commercial break too?

I can’t agree about Ade’s solo–I thought it was too busy. I guess it may be because he didn’t really work with the music. It was like he had something ready, his music didn’t get cleared and he didn’t change a thing. Speaking of, wonder why Jeanine danced to her tango routine song?

This week was a big step backward. By this time last year, they had been doing two paired routines for two weeks. They should have scrapped most of the choreography segments and done two routines, solos and groups. They definitely had time. If you consider away the time it would’ve taken for two couples to do two routines and solos, you could have fit in the group routines. Step up your game, season 5! They basically had this week off.

Ballroom “solos”: get a partner, but half the time and no lifts? If I was on this show as a ballroom dancer, I would never be dumb enough to actually do a ballroom solo. In an interview, Mark and Chelsie said you could do whatever you want to do, so they should just do something else. Call it a theater arts solo–that’s balletics and ballroom put together… kind of. Not really. But it’s better than pathetic hip shakin’.

Chris: I think the end-game the jidges were playing by sending Chbeeb home with their final cut should be becoming painfully clear here: Yes, he was consistently better than Kupono at doing stuff he still wasn’t very good at, but what every new routine really revealed was how great Jeanine was and how she needed to be freed from their too-comfortable showmance pairing in order to shine. By cutting Caitlyn, they did much the same thing with Jason (aside from the “too-comfortable showmance” thing, that is, because I never got the impression Jason and Caitlyn even *liked* each other much). Now he can get the benefit of being partnered by Jeanine, and really rise to the occasion…and much as I too miss Phillip, I’m okay with that.

The final elimination show before the top ten did not give the judges the opportunity to eliminate Kupono; he wasn’t in the bottom three. The choice was Jason, Chbeeb, or Ade. As much as I like Chbeeb, and I like him a ton, I can’t honestly say at this point that I would have eliminated Jason or Ade ahead of him.

While watching that episode, yeah, I would have sacrificed Jason. But he’s looking much better now that he’s not partnering Caitlyn. The judges see more than I do, so I’m willing to assume they knew Jason was going to shine.

They could have dropped Kupono instead of Vitolio in the previous episode, in which case perhaps Vitolio would have been in the bottom three in place of Jason or Ade, in which case maybe you save Chbeeb… but the judges don’t control the votes and I think it’d be giving them way too much credit to assume they’d plan to that level of detail.

None of that negates the way the format hampers non-contemporary dancers, and none of it negates Nigel’s attitude towards ballroom and hip hop dancers. But I don’t think there was an end-game, just an unfortunate lack of Kupono in the final bottom three. If he’d been there, he would have gone home.